Before the development of radio and television, very few people could engage in multicast messaging. Similarly, before the development of telephones, peer-to-peer communications were limited to in-person discussions. With the development of electronic mail, message boards and similar electronic communications tools, complex peer-to-peer and multicast messages may become possible almost without regard to financial means or popularity. The development of social networking further democratizes complex multicast communication, and also generates a hybridized communication: peer-to-peer communication within multicast group, which may include almost any number of members greater than one. The social networking communication mechanism may occupy a common area between gossip, multicast, voyeurism, business networking, social networking, family communications, peer-to-peer communication, reunion services, social and political activism, and commercial endeavors.
With the growing popularity of multicast speakers (such as those with Twitter™ followers and Facebook™ people and pages), the amount of communication ultimately directed to each listener may increase greatly. Twitter™, Google+™ and Facebook™ are examples of social networking and/or microblogging services offered through particular branded websites. The Twitter™ service enables its users to send short messages and read other users' short messages, called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default on the user's “status” page; however senders can restrict message delivery to an approved group. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets, in which case the system automatically displays the other tweets on the user's Twitter™ page. The combination of the user's tweets and the tweets of all other uses that the user follows combine to create the user's Twitter™ feed. A dedicated Twitter™ user, for example, might follow updates—subscribe to receive tweets—from any practicable number of people. A similar process may occur with social networking sites such as Facebook™, where a user can receive a message alerting the user whenever information is posted to the user's page or a friend's page. Many sites, including Facebook™ and Google+™, aggregate third party posts in a manner similar to the Twitter™ feed.
Although there is substantial complexity to human affairs, the exponentially increasing number of speakers each person listens to has resulted in a need to limit the volume of data accompanying each message. The natural limitations to text messaging (even as further limited by the Twitter™ service to 140 characters) may have started as a technical limitation of the service, but has become a near-necessity to those attempting to “drink from the fire hose” of data.
As people have become accustomed to feeding current status information about themselves, sometimes referred to in brief as their “status,” to their friends and followers, so too have they accepted limiting the amount of data required to convey their status. The natural forms of communication that predated electromagnetic and digital communication, such as talking, wearing pins or shirts bearing messages, and speeches may have parented modern communication, but are now often ignored as ways to convey portions of the data stream that constitute modern communication. As odd as it may seem to those raised before the advent of internet-driven social networking, it is not unusual for friends present in the same location to check their Twitter™ or Facebook™ data to monitor the current “status” of other, absent friends—or even of friends currently sitting at the same table. In short, while modern mini-messaging is commonly used to digitally convey real world events, the converse is not true: Digital status does not feed into the real-world communication modes that predated digital communication. Put another way, people may choose to expose all of their Facebook or Twitter updates to the general public, but those same updates are unavailable to other people in the same room unless the other people choose to access a networked device such as a laptop and ask for that data.
Another shortcoming of connecting social networking to the physical world is that social networking programs do not prioritize data based on real world conditions. For example, a user who lives in San Francisco but is visiting Los Angeles may be more interested in updates from friends and entities in Los Angeles than he normally would be while at home. While friends, physical media such as newspapers, and other real world elements incorporate real-time environmental conditions in their determination of what data to present and how to present it, social networking, micro-blogging and services such as Twitter do not.